Tag Archives: Federico Curiel

One need only glance over the many titles in the lucha movie genre to see that there is a long history of enmity between Mexican wrestlers and mummies. This goes all the way back to 1964, when Elizabeth Campbell and Lorena Velazquez threw down against a pop-eyed, reconstituted Aztec warrior in their sophomore effort as The Wrestling Women, Las Luchadoras contra la Momia, and continued throughout the rest of the sixties, during which Santo, the most celebrated movie luchadore of them all, would come up against shambling bandage jockeys in films like Santo and Blue Demon vs. The Monsters and La Venganza de la Momia. But the conflict didn’t really kick into high gear until 1972, when the success of a little film called The Mummies of Guanajuato (aka Las Momias de Guanajuato) guaranteed that, for the next several years, Mexican movie screens would seldom see respite from the spectacle of colorfully-garbed, masked Mexican grapplers working their moves on a seemingly endless series of inexplicably muscular mummified adversaries.

In much the same way that many Western audiences have a problem accepting the musical numbers in Bollywood films, North American audiences have always had an issue accepting the central concept behind the Mexican luchador movies: that a bunch of masked wrestlers clad in full wrestling gear would tool around Mexico solving crimes, fighting monsters, and judging beauty contests. The inability on the part of many non-Mexican viewers to accept this as anything other than patently absurd has a lot to do with the way we think of professional wrestlers — in that, we think of them as professional wrestlers. In Mexico, by contrast, these luchadores have less in common with Macho Man Randy Savage and more in common with the likes of Batman Green Arrow, or any of the masked pulp heroes of the early third of the 20th century. They are comic book superheroes. North American audiences that often balk at the idea of crusading luchadores rarely have any issue with comic book superheroes, who dress just as outlandishly and often have superhuman powers to boot.

It is perhaps a sign that I’ve succumbed to the stressors of the season that I’ve been re-watching a lot of these earlier lucha movies lately. While the Mexican wrestling movies of the late 60s and 70s can be amusingly trashy, those made a decade previous exhibit an appealing hokeyness and sincere desire to entertain that makes them, for me, the ideal form of cinematic comfort food. They also, in the case of films like 1960’s Neutron vs. The Death Robots, exhibit a not inconsiderable amount of appealing, old school style. Neutron vs. The Death Robots, the second in a series of five Neutron films, was directed by Federico Curiel, one of the most prolific directors of Mexican lucha films. Working with literally every major star in the genre, Curiel helmed a steady stream of entries that lasted from the early 60s until the twilight of the Mexican wrestling film’s popularity in the late 70s, in the process providing the genre with its last box office hurrah with 1972’s wildly successful Las Momias de Guanajuato.